Modern Payments for Education: Streamlining Tuition and Fee Collections and Improving Family Experiences

School budgets across all levels of the education system are forever under threat.

For public schools, the pressure primarily comes from volatile state and federal funding sources, as well as reliance on local property taxes that are tied to economic conditions.

Independent schools face the challenge of ensuring a steady flow of tuition fees and donations to attract and retain quality staff, navigate fluctuations in enrollment, and remain competitive.

At the college and university levels, persistent rising costs, increased competition, and decreases in funding pose constant operational and financial challenges.

For educational institutions of all kinds, ensuring the timely collection of fees, tuition, donations, and more from all funding sources is critical. Equally as important, as a result, is simplifying collection processes and providing students and parents with a seamless way to transact.

From recurring tuition payments for an expensive university to a one-time payment for an elementary school field trip or an afterschool program, advanced and modern payment technologies help educational institutions at all levels to:

• Accelerate the collection of tuition and other school fees
• Reduce the number of missed payments
• Offer a wider range of convenient payment options, including credit cards, digital wallets, and ACH
• More easily reconcile budgets and forecast spending

The Benefits of Advanced Payments Technology

Parents want to be able to complete transactions within the school’s website or mobile environment without having to engage an outside platform. In many cases, however, schools need to use outside platforms to manage some part of their operations. Embedding payment capabilities minimizes the number of those platforms required and streamlines the experiences for students, families, and school administrators.

For parents of younger students, payment capabilities reduce the need to rely on their children to deliver checks or cash to their intended destination. Parents can have credit cards kept on file to further automate payment processes and choose from any number of transaction methods, from the most popular digital services to ACH, making it easy for transactions to be completed. International students can avoid the complexity of making payments across borders, as well.

For educational institutions, introducing payments enhances efficiencies, minimizes errors, and reduces the time and energy administrators and staff typically spend chasing after late or missing payments. With a centralized financial management system, schools can more easily track the status of payments, manage recurring payments, initiate early interventions with frequent late payers, and access real-time financial reports. By increasing the likelihood that payments will be made quickly and on time, schools can more accurately budget, forecast, and commit to making the kinds of investments in new technologies and infrastructure improvements that attract greater numbers of enrollees.

The Hidden Costs of Disconnected Systems in Schools

In recent years, a marketplace of educational technology vendors has emerged, offering a range of software solutions designed to meet the varying needs of educational institutions, including payments. The growth of this marketplace has resulted in schools and the many departments having accumulated numerous distinct and disconnected applications, systems, and platforms. Multiple platforms mean more logins, missed messages, and confusion for families.

Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Schools are seeking to reduce costs and management headaches by consolidating vendors and providing students and families with a unified platform and single point of access for communication and academic information. As this consolidation takes place, educational institutions can capitalize on all the benefits offered by advanced payment technologies by choosing and deploying a platform that offers embedded payment and finance capabilities.

Embedded Payments Deliver Better Results for Everyone

BlueSnap, a global payments company, enables school information platform providers to easily build in the payments experiences their customers desire. Through APIs and hosted solutions, companies like Veracross, a leading school information platform provider, enable their customers to have a streamlined and simplified payment experience within a unified environment.

Veracross users now reconcile payments in minutes instead of days. Parents can have their payment information saved for faster processing. Schools can insert payment links within emails to make it as easy as possible to complete a payment. Users can access a detailed breakdown of all transactions on a single screen in real time.

Because of strict budget oversight and complex vendor approval processes, adopting new solutions in school environments can be challenging. New vendors are often required to submit to a comprehensive and lengthy vetting process to validate security and privacy protections. Many smaller schools do not have a dedicated IT or operations person with the responsibility for managing software solutions and training fellow users, further elongating the process.

By working with school information systems platforms that have embedded advanced payment capabilities, such as those offered by BlueSnap, educational institutions of all sizes and categories can leverage the power of payments to accelerate incoming collections, dramatically reduce reconciliation time, and maintain the financial and operational stability needed to deliver exceptional academic experiences for students.

Michael Misasi is Senior Director for Embedded Payments at BlueSnap, a global payments technology company